# The Spiritual Self in Baha'i Studies

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-18 — 1 clipping.*

---

> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Jack McLean, The Spiritual Self in Baha'i Studies, bahai-library.com.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> The Spiritual Self in Bahá’í Studies
> 
> J.A. McLean
> 
> 2003
> 
> Introduction
> 
> Some Bahá'í scholars of religion have justifiably regretted the large gaps that still exist in
> the fabric of Bahá'í religious studies. Stephen Lambden, for example, observes that "Many issues
> within the history of religions urgently need researching"1 and "Some areas within the
> humanities have been largely neglected by Bahá'ís. The various branches of theology are
> something about which Bahá'ís need to be aware."2 Lambden states further on the same point:
> 
> Being philosophically informed is particularly important for Bahá'ís who are in dialogue
> with persons concerned with ethical, epistemological, theological and metaphysical
> issues. Too few Bahá'ís have to date grappled with this complicated but vital area.3
> 
> Lambden also comments that Bahá'í literature directed to members of the world's great
> religions is also sadly lacking.
> 
> In relation to major religious groups, Bahá'ís have yet, for example, to produce adequate
> literature directed towards Jews (18 million), Zoroastrians (100,000 in the world;
> around 5,000 in the U.K.) as well as the many millions of Confucians (almost 6
> million), Shintoists (almost 3.5 million), Taoists etc. The Bahá'í literature for Hindus
> 
> . Stephen Lambden, "Doing Bahá'í Scholarship in the 1990's: A Religious Studies Perspective", The Bahá'í Studies
> Review, 3:2, 1994, 67. The sad fact of the matter is (a point clearly implied by Lambden) that very few Bahá'ís to
> date are interested in the scientific study of religion. The scholarly circle remains consequently quite small. The
> relatively small band of Bahá'í scholars who dedicate their work to these vital areas cannot possibly do all of the
> work required. The significant efforts that they have made, however, have broken the ground for those who will
> follow them.
> . Stephen Lambden, "Doing Bahá'í Scholarship in the 1990's: A Religious Studies Perspective", The Bahá'í Studies
> Review, 3:2, 1994, 74-75.
> . Stephen Lambden, "Doing Bahá'í Scholarship in the 1990's: A Religious Studies Perspective", The Bahá'í Studies
> Review, 3:2, 1994, 75. Lambden cites doctoral candidate Robert Parry's article "Philosophical Theology and
> Bahá'í Scholarship" in Bahá'í Studies Bulletin. 6.4-7.2 (Oct. 1992): 66-91 as a recent instructive paper in this
> area.
> 
> and Buddhists is very, very small.4
> 
> Other scholars have likewise pointed to the lacunae in Bahá'í religious studies. Seena
> Fazel has documented the still relatively minor attention the Bahá'í Faith has received as an
> object of academic interest. Fazel's study, states that "The Bahá'í Faith is suffering from a major
> dearth of academic literature."5 Based on his graph of the number of articles on the Bahá'í Faith
> appearing in indexed academic journals from 1970-1990, Fazel states that "the number of articles
> on the Faith will significantly decrease if the numbers remain static."6 Udo Schaefer also finds
> that the Bahá'í Faith compared to Islam which by its mid-second century had already founded its
> four schools of law (Ar.madháhib; sing. madhhab),7 has produced comparatively little
> specifically religious scholarship focusing on Bahá'í theology and metaphysics.8
> 
> Correlating the Knowledge of the Spiritual Self With Existential Theism: A Synopsis
> 
> This paper seeks to address one of those several issues alluded to by Lambden above. In
> so doing, it moves beyond merely decrying a gap, and initiates a preliminary discussion of what
> is potentially one of the most critical, but as yet largely unexplored, parameters of Bahá'í
> philosophical theology. As indicated, the theme of this paper is the knowledge of the spiritual
> self and the possibilities of existential theism to further such a perspective. By the knowledge of
> the spiritual self I intend three meanings. First, the individual's spiritual understanding of the
> Divine Word or divine questions and the spiritual experiences of living-in-the-world as
> progenitors of real self-knowledge, that is, the understanding of self and others as lesser divine
> beings. Second, the knowledge of the spiritual self and spiritual experience which I view as
> being one thing, that is, existing together in a symbiotic relationship. This symbiotic relationship
> of spiritual knowledge and experience would appear to be clearly implied in Bahá'u'lláh's Kitáb-
> i-Iqán, for the Iqán presents the knowledge of God as intuitional existential knowledge; that is,
> 
> . "Doing Bahá'í Scholarship", 66.
> . Seena Fazel, "The Bahá'í Faith and Academic Journals", The Bahá'í Studies Review, 3.2 (1994), 85.
> . Seena Fazel, "The Bahá'í Faith and Academic Journals", The Bahá'í Studies Review, 3.2 (1994), 83. Fazel points
> out, however, that not all Bahá'í periodical literature has been indexed. Although World Order is indexed, The
> Journal of Bahá'í Studies is not. One can concur with Fazel this is "a serious omission". (83) The indexing of
> The Journal of Bahá'í Studies would have increased the number of academic articles on the Bahá'í Faith. This
> realisation makes the outlook marginally less bleak than it appears.
> . The position of most Muslim scholars is that the differences between the four schools are relatively minor and
> concern incidental matters. `Abdur Rahman I. Doi, professor of Islamic law writes, for example, in Sharí'ah The
> Islamic Law: "If one closely examines the fiqh of the four schools, one will never come across any difference of
> opinions as far as the basic principles of Islam are concerned. The differences mainly centre around furúát (tiny
> branches) of theology rather than Usúl (the fundamental principles) of belief." (85) The four schools of Islamic
> jurisprudence are: (1) the Hanafíte school founded by Abú Hanífa (d. 767). (2) the Malakite school founded by
> Málik ibn Anas (d. 795). (3) the Sháf'ite, founded by Sháf'í (d. 820). (4) the strictest and most conservative
> Hanbalite school, founded by Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855). For a substantive presentation of the four schools of
> the Sharí'ah see [title].
> . Udo Schaefer, "Challenges to Bahá'í Studies", The Bahá'í Studies Review 2.1 (1992):26.
> 
> its epistemé and its ontology present the knowledge of God primarily as an experience to be
> immediately apprehended by the soul, and not predominantly as the contemplation of an abstract
> set of propositions or truths arrived at deductively.9 This ontology of the immediate presence of
> the divine, the possibility that the seeker can be seized by the effects of divine revelation, is one
> of the great themes, not only of the Iqán, but indeed of all scripture. The knowledge of the
> spiritual self (self-knowledge) would here be perceived as the highest form of knowledge worth
> possessing. Third, the knowledge of the spiritual self refers to the persona of the scholar as
> hermeneute, as one who subjectively interprets the experiences and questions of spiritual life
> from the standpoint of his or her vécu or Weltanschauung, rather than treating a set of objective
> questions to be elucidated in analytical fashion, the more commonly accepted method of
> scholarship. Such an affirmation makes self-knowledge the common property of both sacred
> study and literary tradition.
> 
> I maintain that the knowledge of the spiritual self as a mode of reasoning and a
> hermeneutic of self, the world and divine questions is of capital importance in Bahá'í studies for
> the simple reason that it deals with spiritual anthropology, the life of the believer as a diminished
> reflection of the "Self of God"(nafs illahí),10 composed of those divine attributes which, in part
> or in whole, constitute the individual's spiritual anthros and distinguish the spiritual person as the
> preeminent creation of God. Further, such an approach to Bahá'í studies alludes to the growth of
> the soul in its continual evolution toward the ultimate and final goal of spiritual life, union with
> God.
> 
> The main purpose of religion, as the Bahá'í writings repeatedly affirm, is spiritual
> transformation11 which is but another word for enhanced self-knowledge. This knowledge of the
> spiritual self is not merely theoretical, however, but derives from and leads to praxis. It is more
> importantly savoir-faire, that is, "know-how" and should be distinguished from knowledge as an
> end in itself. Self-knowledge is thus more perfect knowledge in that it constitutes both end and
> means. Any self-respecting Bahá'í theology cannot, consequently, afford to neglect spiritual
> anthropology, that is, an understanding of the human person as both subject and object of
> 
> . This view that divine knowledge is derived from spiritual experience is a form of empiricism. I do not intend this
> view in an absolute way since this spiritual empiricism is one that derives from the phenomenon of divine
> revelation and is, to a great extent, dependent upon it. My comment about the "the intuitional existential
> knowledge" of the Iqán refers mainly to those passages in which Bahá'u'lláh outlines the qualifications of the
> true seeker in the search for God and describes the mystical experience of the divine encounter (pp. 192-99).
> . Juan Ricardo Cole states the Self of God "seems to refer to the totality of God's active attributes, of which the
> prophets and messengers are manifestations" (The Concept of Manifestation in the Bahá'í Writings 18). I have
> identified the Self of God with the human being because of Bahá'u'lláh's statement: "Upon the inmost reality of
> each and every created thing He hath shed the light of one of His names, and made it a recipient of the glory of
> one of His attributes, Upon the reality of man, however, He hath focused the radiance of all of His names and
> attributes, and made it a mirror of His own Self" (Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings 65).
> . Bahá'u'lláh writes, for example, "...is not the object of every Revelation to effect a transformation in the whole
> character of mankind, a transformation that shall manifest itself both outwardly and inwardly, that shall affect
> both its inner life and external conditions? For if the character of mankind be not changed, the futility of God's
> universal Manifestations would be apparent" (Kitáb-i-Iqán, 240-41).
> 
> theological and philosophical understanding. The intellectual understanding of such a mode of
> spiritual anthropology well serves the method of correlation advocated by Shoghi Effendi, a
> polyvalent method based on the assumption of commonality between the things being compared,
> a commonality that is liable to forge links between the Bahá'í Faith and other world religions, as
> well as modern philosophies and movements. In this case the method of correlation links the
> Bahá'í Faith to existential theism.
> 
> This paper incidentally makes no facile assumption that the knowledge of the spiritual
> self (self-knowledge) is an easy task. It is not a finality, but rather a continual becoming. Sφren
> Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-55) who "is certainly not a philosopher" according to Sartre,12 and
> who has been considered as something of a paraphilosopher, but who Wittgenstein called
> nonetheless "by far the most profound thinker of the last century",13 has said that "An existing
> individual is constantly in process of becoming...and translates all his thinking into terms of
> process."14 Kant, moreover, doubted the possibility of true self knowledge when he said: `We
> only know what is an appearance of ourselves'.15 In the light of this last saying particularly, one
> recognizes the monumental accomplishment of the believer who becomes the expression of the
> Hadíth of the Prophet Muhammad or Imám 'Alí and quoted by Bahá'u'lláh: "He hath known God
> who hath known himself."16
> 
> The Spiritual Self as Subject and the Objective Question
> 
> The three main functional tendencies or sub-disciplines that have emerged thus far in
> Bahá'í studies of religion are Bahá'í history, exegesis and theology.17 Some scholars remain
> 
> . Marxism and Existentialism, p. 370 Kaufmann. Sartre states that Kierkegaard himself refused the title of
> philosopher because he refused all systematisation which for him smacked too much of finality.
> . Ludwig Wittgenstein, in private correspondence with M. O'C. Drury, in Acta Philosophia Fennica, 28:1-3, 1976,
> North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1976, quoted in Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, ix. The
> complete quotation is "Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a
> saint." How unlike Wittgenstein, however, to canonize the religious.
> . Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, (79) trans. by David L. Swenson and Walter Lowrie
> (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941). Concluding Unscientific Postscript is usually regarded as the
> work that represents the point of view that objective reasoning is of little or no use in the life of religious faith.
> As I understand the Bahá'í view, Kierkegaard's views on this question have been argued in extremis, but the gist
> of his thinking on this matter is real and plausible.
> . Quoted by Simone Weil in Lectures on Philosophy 191. I have been unable to find the source for Kant's saying.
> . Gleanings, p. 178.
> . By exegesis I mean the act of explaining a sacred text in the broadest sense. At the present stage of development
> in the exegesis of Bahá'í texts, Bahá'í scholars necessarily have recourse to translation and commentary, although
> strictly speaking, as Bible translator J.B. Phillips has pointed out, translation and commentary are two different
> tasks. Translation and commentaries from the source languages of the Bahá'í revelation (Arabic and Persian),
> usually rely heavily on elucidating the text in light of its Islamic background since a not insignificant portion of
> the phraseology and theological motifs of Bahá'í sacred texts is Islamic in origin. Bahá'í exegesis at this point is
> quite literal. There is usually no attempt to apply the meaning of Bahá'í scriptural texts to contemporary
> situations, although some effort has been made to correlate some Bahá'í scriptures to the other world's religions.
> 
> skilled in and blend all three modes in their work, while others follow mainly one orientation.
> Historical studies aim for a veridical reconstruction of the sacred event; text-rooted studies insure
> faithfulness to the thought of the authors of Bahá'í scripture with learned commentary; Bahá'í
> theology helps to ensure theological "correctness" and allows for a correlation of Bahá'í thought
> to other movements and philosophies both ancient and modern. Yet all of these disciplines
> remain basically content oriented.18 Content orientation assumes that the Bahá'í Faith and any
> correlated subjects under study are essentially an objective collection of data to be researched
> and elucidated in a meaningful way. Yet the net effect of these approaches, while they are valid
> in their own right, is to risk becoming identified with `Abdu'l-Bahá's pointed critique of religion
> as being reduced to "the noise, the clamor, the hollowness of religious doctrine".19 Moreover,
> what `Abdu'l-Bahá has called "the discovery of the verities of life"20 and `ilm-i vújúdí (the
> knowledge of being/existence)21 has thus far been conspicuously lacking in Bahá'í studies of
> religion.
> 
> The historical, doctrinal or exegetical approaches to Bahá'í religious studies, while they
> are making good use of increasingly critical and objective methods, and function consequently as
> a deterrent to dogmatism and an easy apologetic, have by their prevalence created a benign
> neglect of other capital questions such as practical ethics which `Abdu'l-Bahá has defined as "the
> fundamental aspect of the religion of God".22 Such approaches have, moreover, tended to divorce
> Bahá'í theology from the existential experience of the individual believer which in my view must
> remain one of the primary purposes of theology. The three pronged approach of the historical-
> exegetical-theological disciplines in Bahá'í studies has also resulted in a certain monotony of
> 
> Further, one must speak of Bahá'í theology as a theology without dogma, creed or decree. Since Bahá'u'lláh
> structured his faith without a clerical caste, unlike the religions of the past, any theological reflection remains
> strictly the result of the learned efforts of Bahá'í scholars, and their ability to convince others of the soundness of
> their views. At the present state of development of the Bahá'í Faith, there is no "official" institutional
> endorsement of the work of any living Bahá'í scholar.
> . Even though I am aware of the limitations of propositional approaches to theology, my own articles have in fact
> been mainly content oriented. See, for example, my "Prolegomena to a Bahá'í Theology", The Journal of Bahá'í
> Studies, 5:1, March-June, 1992, 25-67 and "Propositions on a Comprehensive Theology" in The Journal of
> Bahá'í Studies. [...] It would be silly to argue for a curtailment of objective content writing. What this paper
> advocates is simply diversifying the field of Bahá'í theology.
> . The Divine Art of Living, 25.
> . Bahá'í World Faith 274.
> . For the expression `ilm-i vújúdí see, for example, `Abdu'l-Bahá's discussion of "The Knowledge of the Divine
> Manifestations" (157) in Some Answered Questions. Juan Ricardo Cole has alluded to a resemblance between
> `Abdu'l-Bahá's `ilm-i vújúdí with that of Plotinus' primal intellection in the Enneads, V. 3,2 and a similar notion
> in Avicenna, De Anima, 248-49. See "The Concept of Manifestation in the Bahá'í Writings", n. 149, 35.
> . `Abdu'l-Bahá has stated that "the ordinances which concern the realm of morals and ethics" constitute "the
> fundamental aspect of the religion of God". The complete quotation is: "These [essential spiritual teachings] are
> faith in God, the acquirement of virtues which characterize perfect manhood, praiseworthy morals, the
> acquisition of the bestowals and bounties emanating from the divine effulgences — in brief, the ordinances
> which concern the realm of morals and ethics. This is the fundamental aspect of the religion of God, and this is
> of the highest importance because knowledge of God is the fundamental requirement of man" (The
> Promulgation of Universal Peace, 403)
> 
> method for a religion that increasingly demands diversity in a pluralism of meaning as it seeks to
> encounter the various schools of thought of both Orient and Occident.
> 
> Kierkegaard's polemic launched with Hegel and the Hegelians in mind against the
> speculative idealist philosophers of the last century23 presented a facet that sheds by comparison
> some light on the current state of Bahá'í religious studies. Kierkegaard argued that the
> speculative philosophers with their categories, finality, systematisation and historicisation of
> religious phenomena had neglected to deal with the most crucial issues in Christianity. Although
> Kierkegaard was somewhat strained in his polemic, and created ironically an entire metaphysical
> baggage of his own making, not unlike in all respects the speculative systems to which he was
> heavily indebted, he was correct in his observation that the philosophical systems of his day for
> the most part bracketed the most real and urgent of human questions24: personal meaning,
> suffering, anxiety and despair, peace of mind, faith and doubt, hope, happiness, spiritual rebirth
> and awakening, immortality. And divine love... where did such a vital reality fit into the
> philosophers' schemes? The religious subject, Kierkegaard maintained with good common sense,
> was interested primarily in eternal happiness rather than speculation:
> 
> The subject is in passion infinitely interested in his eternal happiness, and is now
> supposed to receive assistance from speculation, i.e., by himself philosophizing. But in
> order to philosophize he must proceed in precisely the opposite direction, giving
> himself up and losing himself in objectivity, thus vanishing from himself.25
> 
> While no grand systematising philosophers or theologians have thus far emerged within
> the college of Bahá'í scholars,26 Kierkegaard's remarks have a certain pertinence to the current
> 
> . Hegel's absolute idealism was the reigning philosophy in the Denmark of Kierkegaard's day. At the basis of
> Kierkegaard's disagreement with Hegel, to whom he was in many respects indebted, was Kierkegaard's assertion
> that attaining happiness, or in philosophical terms the highest good, could not be secured through philosophizing
> alone. For Kierkegaard, ideas alone were paltry means in securing eternal happiness which he viewed as the
> highest good (Kierkegaard 19-20). Like Hegel, Kierkegaard employed dialectic, but unlike Hegel's logical
> dialectic working within a closed system, Kierkegaard's dialectic was existential and expounded upon the
> solitary individual working within the three spheres of the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Kierkegaard
> attacked not only Hegelian idealism, but Kantian moral idealism as well. He felt that all forms of rational
> theology were inadequate for a true understanding of the human condition.
> . In inveighing against the systematic, speculative philosophers of his time, Kierkegaard became the founding
> founder of another form of philosophy, existentialism which spawned in time both theistic and atheistic varieties.
> It was Kierkegaard who coined the word "existential." [Kaufmann] [influences on literature, psychology, etc.]
> [controversy with his own church]
> . Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David L. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton,
> N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 49. What Kierkegaard criticises here is the annihilation, so to speak,
> of the religious subject in the objective question. He argues rather for a validation and discovery of selfhood
> through discourse.
> . With the occasional urgings one reads for the Bahá'í systematic theologian to emerge, one has to wonder if such
> a grand systematisation of Bahá'í theology would be desirable, even though its accomplishment would be a
> major tour de force. Kierkegaard maintained that systematisation corresponded to finality but existence is
> 
> pursuits of Bahá'í scholars of religion. For, one scarcely finds any elaboration of a
> Lebensphilosophie or a vécu (lived experience), a Realdialektik that deals with the above issues
> in an existential mode, one that is, however, careful to avoid an uncritical apologetic and mere
> rhetorical effect. The approach that I advocate here would nonetheless maintain a secondary
> pastoral concern, but one that would be addressed primarily through didactics rather than homily
> or counselling. For, if Bahá'í theology does not illuminate spiritual anthros, does not inspire or
> improve in some way the life of the believer, then it risks remaining in `Abdu'l-Bahá's phrase in
> the realm of "Thought that belongs to the world of thought alone."27 It would be both real and
> ideal, however, were the writings of Bahá'í scholars at some level to translate into an enrichment
> of the believer's spiritual experience of the quotidian.
> 
> This concern to address the concrete spiritual issues of "real life" in a manner befitting
> philosophical discourse raises another question about the mode of Bahá'í scholarship. I referred
> above to "the persona of the scholar as hermeneute". Normally, one does not think of the scholar
> as having a persona (Lat.=mask; per=through + sonus=sound), that is, a vehicle for voicing
> thoughts. It would seem, however, that scholars generally adopt one of two modes of discourse:
> either the objective-detached or the subjective-engaged. I argue, however, that it would be
> beneficial to Bahá'í thought for the scholar to emerge now more in the subjective-engaged mode,
> as someone who speaks with a persona, that is, a characteristic and personal voice and style that
> befits an advocate as much as an analyst. The persona refers moreover to the individuality or
> characteristic being of the scholar, and the voice with which the scholar speaks would be from
> the real self, not the projected self. This real voice of self offers to the reader, in a spirit of
> intersubjective communion, the richness of the scholar or writer's experience of divine
> subjectivity, the experience of the self with God, others or events interpreted through the prism
> of the thinking, believing, living, reacting self of the scholar/writer.
> 
> In the analytical, objective-detached content approach that has thus far dominated Bahá'í
> religious studies, however, the scholar is not transparent to the work, but has subjugated the
> spiritual self to the objective question under study. The writer/scholar is not there, so to speak.
> Only the question is there and the elucidation of the question. When writing in the persona of
> spiritual self, however, one is essentially interpreting experience, rather than analyzing a
> question or detailing an incident. This hermeneutic of spiritual experience neither requires
> references to academic authorities nor the observance of scholarly conventions, although they are
> by no means excluded. In this type of existential writing, the author would be more transparent to
> the reader and less subjugated to the dialectics of the objective idea. This form of Bahá'í
> 
> precisely the opposite of reality in which new truths are constantly emerging (Kierkegaard's Concluding
> Unscientific Postscript 107). The current academic fashion of postmodern deconstructionalism with its anti-
> systematic bias goes against any current of systematisation, at least for the present. The universalistic content of
> Bahá'í sacred scripture, in any case, would seem to defy any one theological system to do justice to the diversity
> of themes and concepts treated in the Bahá'í writings. It is rather more likely that a number of differing
> theological and metaphysical thought systems will emerge in time and coexist within and around the Divine
> Word revealed by Bahá'u'lláh.
> . Reality of Man 9.
> 
> scholarship would essentially liberate the scholar to move further along the path of intellectual
> creativity by placing the locus of the authority of interpretation within the framework of the
> scholar's spiritual perception. Put differently, the subjective-engaged mode allows the scholar to
> become largely the creator of his/her own world of discourse.
> 
> In this same vein, Rudolf Bultmann writes that it is a false notion to suppose that one has
> to suppress subjectivity and individuality in order to attain "objective knowledge":
> 
> Nothing is sillier than the requirement that an interpreter must silence his subjectivity,
> extinguish his individuality, if he is to attain objective knowledge. That requirement
> makes good sense only in so far as it is taken to mean that the interpreter has to silence
> his personal wishes with regard to the outcome of the interpretation....For the rest,
> unfortunately, the requirement overlooks the very essence of genuine understanding.
> Such understanding presupposes precisely the utmost liveliness of the understanding
> subject and the richest possible development of his individuality.28
> 
> The question of commitment also crops up in the discussion of scholar as persona. The
> style of academic scholarship today requires a certain emotional detachment of self from the
> subject matter. Indeed, in philosophy the word "emotion" is looked upon as a volatile alien that is
> liable to destabilize the cognitive milieu. According to convention, unless one is engaged in
> apologetics, the writer is not to openly avow commitment to the tradition about which one is
> writing, if one is committed to it, although this commitment may sometimes be presumed. And
> yet, religion is all about a sense of commitment. One is consequently justified in asking why it
> would be excluded for this sense of commitment, without it becoming shouting, or preaching, or
> justifying Bahá'u'lláh's deprecation of the one who "...clamorously asserteth his allegiance to this
> Cause.",29 to be explicitly or indirectly voiced by the writer/scholar. The objective-detached
> mode of scholarship, more often than not, tends to be a safe haven but demands no sense of
> personal risk, judgement, disclosure or advocacy in its marshalling of facts or ideas, in its
> juggling of concepts. It often gives no indication of where it ultimately stands, on what ground of
> being it finally places its feet. It leaves no impression of the scholar as an engaged subject. In
> other words, existential writing makes it clear that the scholar/writer is sitting inside the
> theological circle, and is profoundly engaged not only in reflection, but in life itself.
> 
> When one raises the question of a scholar's commitment, however, one usually has to
> raise the flag of caution against dogmatism because there is always the fear, and the danger, of
> the one slipping into the other. Karl Jaspers put it well, however, when he said: "Man can seek
> 
> . "Das Problem der Hermeneutik," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 47 (1950), 64 quoted by Bernard J.F.
> Lonergan in Method in Theology, 158. (1971 by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, reprinted 1990 in paperback by the
> University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute).
> . The complete sentence reads: "In this Day, We can neither approve the conduct of the fearful that seeketh to
> dissemble his faith, nor sanction the behavior of the avowed believer that clamorously asserteth his allegiance to
> this Cause." (Gleanings, p. 343)
> 
> the path of his truth in unfanatical absoluteness, in a decisiveness which remains open."30 In
> reality, this validation of the persona of the scholar as a subjective interpreter of the spiritual
> experience becomes a de facto necessity because the existential spiritual experience is situated
> within a personal universe, the universe of the "Thou".31
> 
> The Self and Knowledge of the Thing and Knowledge About the Thing
> 
> I return to the question raised above of self-knowledge as praxis (practical ethics) or
> know-how, an empirical form of spiritual science that is distinguished from speculation or
> analysis. Such knowledge applies to both principle and practice. In this context, Northrop Frye
> has referred to a useful distinction created by Plato. There is the type of knowledge that Plato
> ascribes to nous,32 knowledge of things, as opposed to dianoia, knowledge about things. The
> knowledge of things, Frye says, "implies some identification or essential unity of subject and
> object", whereas dianoia implies a dichotomy of subject and object.33 The knowledge of the self
> or self-knowledge relates to nous, that is a direct, intuitive form of knowledge with which the
> knowing subject is intimately bound, a knowledge which leads to praxis, or some deeper insight
> or wisdom. It is knowledge which is intimately dynamic and alive, for it consists of an
> empiricism of spiritual transformation.
> 
> Similarly, Simone Weil in an outline of her lecture notes published as Leçons de
> philosophie (Lectures on Philosophy)34 writes regarding the injunction of the Delphic maxim
> `Know thyself” written over the portico of Apollo's shrine at Delphi, which became a favourite
> motto of Socrates, that by it Socrates meant that self-knowledge, in contradistinction to
> knowledge about external things, was "the ultimate end of all thought."35 Weil comments further
> on the famous dictum: "It seems to have meant: `Why do you have to come and ask me about the
> secrets of nature, of the future? All you need to do is know yourself".36 She states further about
> 
> . From Jasper's essay "On My Philosophy" quoted in Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 232.
> . For a brief treatment of Buber's notion of "I and Thou" see below..
> . Reinhold Niebuhr writes that "Nous may be translated as "spirit" but the primary emphasis lies upon the capacity
> for thought and reason." Aristotle distinguished the nous more sharply from the soul than did Plato. For Plato the
> nous is the highest element in the soul. (The Nature and Destiny of Man, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941, 1:4-25.)
> [p.]
> . Northrop Frye, The Stubborn Structure, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1970), 74 quoted in P. Joseph
> Cahill, "Literary Criticism, religious literature, and theology", Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, Revue
> canadienne/A Canadian Journal, 12:1, 1983, 55.
> . Peter Winch says in his introduction to Hugh Price's translation Lectures on Philosophy that "The Lectures do
> not come directly form Simone Weil's own hand but consist of notes of her lectures at the Roanne lycée taken by
> Madame Anne Reynaud-Guérithault, one of her students in 1933-4." (3) Winch feels, however, that "there is no
> doubt that we have here a very substantial presentation of what was said in the lectures". (3) (Cambridge
> University Press, 1978).
> . Lectures on Philosophy 190.
> . Lectures on Philosophy 190. The pythia or Delphic prophetess at Apollo's shrine sat on a tripod and in a trance-
> 
> self knowledge: "The knowledge of external things has no real interest, or, at least, is of less
> interest for men in general than self-knowledge. And, what is more, self-knowledge is the only
> thing that gives any value to any thought and action you care to think about."37
> 
> While this comment is merely stipulative, Weil writes that the meaning of self-knowing
> is ambiguous. She understands three ordinary meanings to self-knowing: (1) knowing oneself in
> order to change, to correct oneself [transformation]. This would be self-knowledge as a means
> while Socrates viewed self-knowledge as an end (2) knowing oneself in order to find out what
> one is capable of doing, to make good use of oneself [the release of potential]. (3) Following
> Montaigne, knowing oneself in order to come to know human nature.[self-understanding to
> understand others].38 By a process of shorthand dialectic, however, Weil concludes that the "self
> is a term which has no meaning",39 yet she comes to the ethical insight at the conclusion of her
> lecture that "In all circumstances, to be a man, is to know how to separate the `I' and `self'. This
> is a task which never ends."40 Weil here seems to be making a similar distinction found in the
> Bahá'í sacred writings between the "higher" and "lower" self.41 Weil's `I' would represent the
> ego, elemental or selfish desires and the `self', the magnanimity or self-sacrifice of the spiritual
> individual.
> 
> Modes and Defining Points of Existential Theology, Philosophy and Literature
> 
> (A) Modes
> 
> Existentialism is just too diverse to be labelled a "school" of thought.42 What it is,
> 
> like state gave out her oracles. H.W. Parke and D.E.W. Wormell state that "What the inquirer at Delphoi or one
> of the other shrines took away from him was not the actual words of the seer, but an edited official record,
> generally in different hexameters, couched for the most part in very riddling and obscure language, so that if the
> apparent sense of the prophecy proved false, the god could always take refuge behind another interpretation"
> (The Delphic Oracle 2, The Oracular Responses (Oxford 1956).
> . Lectures on Philosophy 191.
> . Simone Weil, Lectures in Philosophy, 190.
> . Weil makes this claim because she says that one cannot "come to grips" with such concepts as the Will and
> Intelligence. As for "emotional states", she says that "one can only lay hold of those emotional states that have
> passed." She says further that there is a fragment of self that continues to exist from moment to moment but the
> term self itself disappears with time (Lectures on Philosophy 191).
> . Lectures on Philosophy 193.
> . "...self has really two meanings, or is used in two senses, in the Bahá'í writings; one is self, the identity of the
> individual created by God. This is the self mentioned in such passages as `he hath known God who hath known
> himself etc.' The other self is the ego, the dark, animalistic heritage each one of us has, the lower nature that can
> develop into a monster of selfishness, brutality, lust and so on. it is this self we must struggle against, or this side
> of our natures, in order to strengthen and free the spirit within us and help it to attain perfection." From a letter
> written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to an individual, December 10, 1947 in Lights of Guidance, comp. Helen
> Hornby, 1144:421. (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, New Delhi, 1983)
> . It lacks, for example, that mark of all schools, a recognizable system for analyzing questions. There is no set of
> 
> however, can best be described as a style or mode of reflection, although the metaphysical
> existentialism of Sartre, Jaspers and Heidegger, for example, is a serious philosophy with a hard
> core. The existential understanding of Existenz (the life of the human being) is accomplished
> through a commonality of themes or perspectives,43 although there are great divergences in the
> way these themes or perspectives are treated. For the purposes of this paper, however, it would
> be useful to distinguish four general modes within existentialism. These modes have all
> borrowed from, reacted to, and influenced one another, so these divisions are in no way iron
> clad. Not surprisingly, even theists and atheists share common concerns in existentialism,
> although the treatment, as we might expect is different.
> 
> (1) First, there is the Christian theistic existentialism founded by Kierkegaard (1813-1855) who
> is the ancestral figure for post world war two existentialists, whether believing or atheistic.
> Although it was Kierkegaard who coined the term "existentialist", Walter Kaufmann sees in
> Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground (1864) the overture to the voice of strident individuality
> that was to be heard later in Kierkegaard.44 Some of the other prominent theistic existentialists
> are Marcel, Buber, Brunner, Tillich, and at the antipodes of one another, Bultmann and Barth.45
> Pre-dating these men, one can recognize existential moods in Pascal and Augustine, in the
> Psalmist, in Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job. Indeed, existential theism finds its most ancient
> roots in the human condition itself, reflected in the Greek myths of estrangement and loss, and
> the Genesis account of the exile of humanity's original parents from Eden with its everafter
> estrangement from self.
> 
> (2) Second, there are the philosophical existentialists such as Sartre, Jaspers and Heidegger who
> are considered to be the fathers of post world war two existential philosophy. John Macquarrie
> 
> common tenets or discourse that interprets the world in a uniform mode. In this respect, one could say that the
> existentialists prefigured the post-moderns with their decidedly anti-systematic bias. Moreover, existentialist
> writers and thinkers sometimes draw diametrically opposed conclusions.
> . See Macquarrie for commonality. Ironically, in true individualist fashion, several of the existentialists rejected
> the label by which they became known, but it has nonetheless stuck. The commonality of existentialism might
> best be compared to another movement, that of modern art. Although there are divergences among the styles of
> impression, cubism, [other styles] they are all clearly recognizable as belonging to the style of modern art.
> . This work of fiction of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) which features the bizarre character of the
> underground man strongly influenced Nietzsche. In Dostoevsky's piece, the underground man thinks aloud in a
> stream of consciousness fashion speaking his thoughts to a group of "gentlemen". The piece shifts constantly
> from theme to theme, but is characterised by that extreme (and bizarre) introspection, subjectivity and intensity
> that was to mark later existentialism.
> . Although Karl Barth's prodigious Church Dogmatics (12 volumes, 7,000 pages) and his Theology of the Word
> identify him as neo-orthodox, there are nonetheless existential dimensions to Barth's work. Unlike the Hegelian
> dialecticians, Kierkegaard has emphasized that there was never any final solution to human questions through
> dialectics. Barth was aware that revelation, the vertical line of transcendence and eternity, intersected the
> horizontal line of human existence in time. This meeting of time and eternity was paradoxical. Barth believed,
> against the dogmatician and the mystic, that our knowledge of God is never immediate. Over against Barth's
> work which seemed to some rigid and traditionalist, Bultmann made his case on the basis of technical biblical
> criticism and an existential dimension based on the early work of Heidegger. To some, Bultmann's works
> seemed overly anthrocentric, even non-theological.
> 
> describes Jaspers and Heidegger as standing "somewhere between the confessed theists and the
> confessed atheists".46 While Jaspers may not have been a confessing philosopher, he was clearly
> a theist, but not, following a mistaken affirmation of Sartre, a professed Catholic.47 Jaspers often
> writes of `philosophical faith',48 recognizes the existence of Deity and his `Transcendence' has
> god-like qualities. Jaspers writes:
> 
> Man strives more decisively than ever for a certainty that he lacks, for the certainty that
> there is that which is eternal, that there is a Being through which alone he himself is. If
> the Deity is, then all hope is possible.... In the Deity alone there is reality, truth, and the
> immutability of being itself. In the Deity there is peace, as well as the origin and aim of
> man who, by himself, is nothing, and what he is he is only in relation to the Deity.49
> 
> This does not sound at all like MacQuarrie's man in the middle. However, with Heidegger the
> case is more complex. Heidegger would not allow himself to be called either a theist or an atheist
> which makes his philosophy vis-à-vis God a confused issue.50 Sartre called Heidegger an
> atheist,51 but Heidegger was careful to disassociate himself from the views of Sartre. In his Letter
> on Humanism (1947) written to a French existentialist, Heidegger writes:
> 
> Because we drew attention to Nietzsche's aphorism that "God is dead", they say that we
> teach atheism. For what is more "logical" than to assume that anyone who experiences
> "the death of God" (in the present age) is a thoroughly godless person?52
> 
> . John Macquarrie, Existentialism, p. 252.
> . In Sartre's famous essay L'existentialisme est un humanisme which made the definitive statement on Sartre's
> brand of atheistic existentialism at the time (1946) he wrote: "There are, on the one hand, the Christians,
> amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics" (quoted in Kaufmann, 347).
> Although Marcel was a professed Catholic, having converted at age forty, Jaspers was not a professed Catholic.
> . in Macquarrie, Existentialism, 247.
> . "On My Philosophy" (1941) and published for the first time in Kaufmann (169).
> . John Passmore, in A Hundred Years of Philosophy says: "Heidegger's own ontology, however, is by no means
> definite on `the Being of God' (488).
> . In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre called Heidegger one of the "existential atheists" along with himself and
> the French existentialists. (348 in Kaufmann)
> . Cited in Passmore, 487. Nietzsche's reference to the death of God ("Gott is tot") was cited by Heidegger in his
> Holzwege (234-35). Although Nietzsche was a professed atheist, his iconoclastic phrase "God is dead" requires
> some nuancing. In Die Froliche Wissenschaft in which the famous phrase occurs, the phrase comes out in a
> dialogue between a madman who in the early hours of the morning ran to market square with a lantern in his
> hand shouted incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!". It was the non-believers among the townspeople who
> mocked and yelled at the madman. "Wither is God", cried the madman. "I shall tell you. We have killed him —
> you and I. All of us are his murderers." Nonetheless, Nietzsche's madman boldly proclaims: "There has never
> been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us — for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher
> history than all history before." It seems that Nietzsche viewed the death of God as the ultimate sacrilege and
> iconoclastic deed. Later the madman visits the churches, and when he is led out and questioned he says in a
> prophetic and starkly moving phrase: "What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of
> 
> On the other hand, Heidegger wrote in Being and Time that "God is, but he does not
> exist." Heidegger maintained, however, that he opposed only the narrow concept of God as the
> supreme value, the one which refused to deal with God's Being.54 But Heidegger's ontology of
> God (if God there be) remains decidedly problematic. Heidegger's `Being' is the closest thing to
> God in his system,55 and despite Heidegger's best attempts to elucidate it, his Being remains
> veiled in the mystery of an all-pervasive paradox. Heidegger often follows a pattern of
> affirmation and negation where Being is concerned. This creates the effect of such a detached
> impartiality, such a silent apophasis, that it has the effect of an untenable neutrality and reduces
> Being to the least descriptive, and least scientific, of divine attributes, the fact the Being is.
> Einstein has said that "For the scientist, there is only "being," but no wishing, no valuing, no
> good, no evil; no goal."56 This sounds like an apt description of Heidegger's God, for Heidegger's
> God (Being) is scientific in the broadest possible sense of the word. It is reduced to the most
> basic of all scientific categories, being itself. Even the values that Heidegger affirms such as
> "care" (alt. concern, solicitude) (Besorgen/Fürsorge) are mildly anthrocentric and do not refer to
> Being itself. Further, Heidegger writes of the paradoxical nature of Being: "Once "existence" is
> understood rightly, the "essence" of being there (Dasein) can be recalled: in its openness, Being
> itself manifests and conceals itself, yields itself and withdraws..."57 This description, however, is
> not so far from Bahá'u'lláh's equally paradoxical and mysterious description of the Great Being
> who hides himself within his own creation but who is everywhere visible at the same time, a
> description which Bahá'u'lláh makes in one of his prayers as "...the most manifest of the manifest
> and the most hidden of the hidden!".58 Bahá'u'lláh's paradoxical assertion about God, illogical
> though it might seem to someone who applies consequent logic, is a wonderful (lit. "full of
> wonder") definition of God as pure Being, that is Mystery Itself. In another direction,
> Heidegger's quest for Nothing ("our quest for Nothing") strikes one as leaning somewhat in the
> direction of Buddhist logic and ontology.59 John Macquarrie remarks in this connection that
> 
> God?" (in Kaufmann, 126-127) Ironically, Nietzsche's madman became a self-fulfilling prophecy in his own life.
> . Being and Time, in Kaufmann 272. One has to wonder if this statement is mere hyperbole or a declaration of
> atheism. The sentence is moreover riddling with its affirmation of "God is", followed by an immediate negation
> "but he does not exist". It is no wonder that Heidegger has been subject to such conflicting interpretations.
> . John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 487-488.
> . Heidegger's most important views on Being were elucidated in Being and Time. [date]
> . "The Laws of Science and the Laws of Ethics" in The World As I See It and Out Of My Later Years, p. 114.
> . "The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics", Heidegger's fifteen page 1949 introduction addended to his
> 1929 famous seventeen page lecture "What is Metaphysics?" (Was ist Metaphysik?)
> . A Selection of Bahá'í Prayers and Holy Writings, Bahá'í Publishing Trust of the Spiritual Assembly of the
> Bahá'ís of Malaysia, Kuala Lampur, 1970, 62.
> . For Heidegger "Nothing" is "an original part of essence (Wesen). It is in the Being (Sein) of what-is that the
> nihilation of Nothing (das Nichten des Nichts) occurs" (251). It was linked to the feeling of dread as the fear of
> death, that is, the fear of annihilation. It is here that we see clearly of the influence of Heidegger on Sartre for
> Sartre speaks in L'être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) of "néantiser le néant" ("annihilating nothingness")
> which is a word for word reproduction of Heidegger. What Heidegger means by das Nichten des Nichts is
> anybody's guess, for why, one might wonder, would something that is already nothing, have to be annihilated?
> As for parallels between Heidegger's thought and Buddhist ontology and logic, in Zen Buddhist logic, for
> 
> "One can scarcely read the books of T.D. Suzuki, for instance, without becoming impressed with
> the many similarities between his version of Zen Buddhism and the teachings of
> existentialism."60
> 
> In his later works, Heidegger had the word Sein (Being) superimposed by a cross-out
> mark, thus: Sein. This cipher indicates that even the notion of Being was inadequate for what
> Heidegger wanted to say. Another possible interpretation is that Heidegger was trying to show
> that Being and its negation (Non-Being) were inextricable. Sartre and Nietzsche are confessed
> atheists, although as Karl Jaspers pointed out in Nietzsche and Christianity, there are certain
> marked ambivalences of Nietzsche toward the religion of Christ: "His opposition to Christianity
> as a reality is inseparable from his tie to Christianity as a postulate. And he himself regarded this
> tie as positive — not merely as something to be severed."61
> 
> (3) Third, there is the literary existentialism of writers such as Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus and
> Sartre, a literature that tends, however, to be dark and pessimistic about human motives and the
> ability of the individual to overcome psychological conflict and live happily. Sartre, for example,
> completely explodes the concept of any meaningful existence, concluding with his well-known
> dictum that life is absurde.62 This literature is to be contrasted with the more positive
> interpersonal relations of Heidegger's Besorgen/Fürsorge63 (concern/solicitude) and Buber's "I-
> Thou" or Gabriel Marcel's "métaphysique de l'espoir" (metaphysic of hope). Literature is also
> one of the three main branches of the common ancestry shared within existentialism by its other
> two modes, theology and philosophy.
> 
> (4) Fourth, there is the school of existential psychiatry and psychology, founded by the Swiss
> psychiatrists Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) and Medard Boss (1903-19..) which has a strong
> 
> example, the opposite of true is not necessarily false. Affirmations followed by negations (or opposites) are not
> viewed as being illogical or contradictory. There are paradoxes, and paradoxes are valid expressions of truth.
> Following Zen logic, P may be both Q and R. "A is A because A is not A". The seemingly illogical koan of the
> Zen master is meant to transcend the duality inherent in the logic of: if P is Q, then P cannot be R. The Zen
> moment, however, is meant to transcend duality. (See David Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism, 46-50).
> With his alternating affirmations of being and nothingness, Heidegger calls to mind the Mádhyamika or Middle
> Doctrine School founded by Nágárjuna in the second century C.E. in which Sûnyatâ is the absolute void
> (nothingness) of all things and particulars, and forms the basis for both relative (Samvriti) and absolute
> (Paramârtha) thought. Simply put, all thought comes from the void. In western mysticism there is, moreover, the
> coincidentia oppositorum, the way or reconciling opposites in a higher spiritual condition in which both poles
> have participated, but in which only one pole of the discussion may dominate at any given time.
> . John Macquarrie, Existentialism, 43. Penguin Books, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England). See also D.T.
> Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, (New York, 1964)
> . Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity, 6., quoted in Macquarrie, 19-20.
> . "La vie est absurde". "Le Suicide". Life's absurdity was made more pointedly by Camus in Le Mythe de Sisyphe,
> 1942) The Myth of Sisyphus, but as John Passmore points out, at least Camus did not attempt to ontologize
> absurdity. "But Camus is not an existentialist; he does not believe that absurdity can be ontologized" (A Hundred
> Years of Philosophy, 491).
> . Being and Time in Macquarrie,. p. 107. Heidegger was also preoccupied with the meaning of anxiety.
> 
> philosophical flavour and which has markedly influenced such writers as Rollo May, Eric
> Fromm, and Viktor Frankel, who have all authored several popular works. Even though
> American experimental psychology worked hard to divest itself of the influence of the
> philosophical overtones of European existentialist thought, the existentialist outlook has found a
> responsive chord in English-speaking readers of psychology, particularly in North America.64 It
> can be seen from these examples that existentialism in its various modes has influenced at the
> same time theology, philosophy, psychology and literature. Indeed, John Macquarrie makes the
> wider argument that existentialism has influenced not only these areas, but also those of
> education, ethics and the visual arts.65 In this Macquarrie sees a common thread in the existential
> worldview that ties several cultural elements together.66
> 
> (B) Defining Points
> 
> Some defining points of existential theism to be highlighted below in a Bahá'í
> perspective are:67 (1) Objectivity, inwardness, passion, doubt and despair in the individual's
> search for truth (2) Living or being-in-the-world (3) Overcoming primordial alienation from God
> (4) The personal mode of divine subjectivity (5) The existential moment and the epiphanic
> moment (6) The realism of facing self. These points will be considered in global fashion and in
> relation to one another.
> 
> In the search for truth, which `Abdu'l-Bahá has called "the first teaching of Bahá'u'lláh"68
> and Shoghi Effendi a "primary duty",69 there is always a seeking subject. This seeking subject,
> 
> . "Existential Psychology" in Theories of Personality.
> . See Macquarrie's chapter "Existential Influence in the Arts and Sciences" in Existentialism, pp. 256-274, in
> which he discusses also the influence of existentialism on psychology, psychiatry, theology, ethics and literature.
> . In addition to the influence of existentialism in philosophy, theology, literature and psychology (if that were not
> enough), Macquarrie finds evidences of the influence of existentialism in education, the visual arts, and ethics.
> See "Existentialist Influence in Arts and Sciences" in Existentialism, (265-274).
> . I am here following the grand themes raised by several existential theologians in my summary below, but I have
> made a conscious attempt to perceive their concerns through the filter of a Bahá'í worldview. A more specifically
> Bahá'í treatment of such concerns can be found below in "Existential Meaning in Bahá'í Sacred History and
> Writings". Each of the six points above deserves a greater in-depth treatment than the limitations of space allow
> for in this article.
> . The Promulgation of Universal Peace, 62. It is perhaps the deceptive simplicity of this teaching that has caused
> it to suffer a certain neglect in comparison with the scholarly treatment of other Bahá'í teachings. For a further
> discussion on the search for truth see chapter one "The Starting Point: The Search for Truth" in J.A. McLean,
> Dimensions in Spirituality. Reflections on the Meaning of Spirituality and Transformation in Light of the Bahá'í
> Faith. (George Ronald, Oxford, 1994) See also Gary L. Matthews instructive article "The Searching Eye"
> (Bahá'í News, September, 1989, pp. 2-9). In his talks in North America, `Abdu'l-Bahá consistently places the
> search for truth first in his sequential presentations of Bahá'í teachings. See, for example, his talks in
> Washington, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal, Sacramento, and on two occasions in New York, and
> also in his long exposé of Bahá'í teachings in Paris. See The Promulgation of Universal Peace and Paris Talks.
> . The complete quotation is: "It [the Bahá'í Faith] moreover, enjoins upon its followers the primary duty of an
> unfettered search after truth." This quotation is particularly noteworthy because of the italicized words. The
> 
> the individual, makes the spiritual world order meaningful for without the truth-seeking
> individual, there would simply be no application of spiritual principles or values of any kind in
> the world. This seeking subject is a person, that is a living, rational, spiritual being who
> embodies the highest worth because he/she possesses the reality of the rational soul. For the
> dimensions in which "we live, and move, and have our being;...",70 truth would not exist without
> its apprehension by the rational soul. It is only the rational soul that is capable of apprehending
> the truth in its depths, in its profoundest meaning.
> 
> The truth should not be perceived, then, as an objective body of data waiting to be
> discovered outside of the seeker, for he/she is subjectively engaged in the process of truth-
> seeking. Under these conditions, purely objective theological knowledge or judgement becomes
> a quasi-impossibility. The search for truth is rather a movement toward the depths of the center
> of being, what St. Paul called "the deep things of God" (1 Corinthians:10). In one sense, the
> seeker is the truth that is being sought. Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out that "The self knows
> the world, insofar as it knows the world, because it stands outside both itself and the world,
> which means that it cannot understand itself except as it is understood from beyond itself and the
> world."71 Although this statement clearly points to the agency of an outward or imploding
> transcendence that assists in self-understanding, Niebuhr implies that self-understanding and
> world-understanding are inextricably linked. Put differently, the catalyst of revelation will unfold
> the perception of the truth that lies both within the seeker's own soul and the world, for the world
> is nothing more than the enformed expressions of what already exists in the soul. The seeker's
> truth does not lie consequently outside the individual as a body of correct, contradiction-free
> propositions, but rather within the soul, and is disclosed in meaningful moments of discovery.
> According to Kierkegaard, moreover, it is only to the extent that one's truth is internalised is one
> happy or unhappy: "The unhappy person is one who has an idea, the content of his life, the
> fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside himself."72
> 
> The process of truth-seeking is nourished, moreover, by a spiritual attitude on the seeker's
> part of active zeal or passion, one that leaves no stone unturned. Even a desperate search would
> be preferable to the way of negative detachment, a detachment lacking the key ingredients of
> sincerity and spiritual passion. Kierkegaard made passion a positive element in the quest for
> truth, for it alone could confer certainty: "The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones",
> he said in a memorable phrase, and another statement could well apply to the state of truth-
> 
> search for truth is not just for those who are seeking truth in their pre-Bahá'í stage. The duty of the search
> continues in the post-Bahá'í stage. "A World Religion. The Faith of Bahá'u'lláh" (pamphlet), a summary
> statement of the origin, teachings and institutions of the Bahá'í Faith prepared in 1947 for the United Nations
> Special Committee on Palestine. (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, Wilmette: Ill. 1950), p. 9 (emphasis mine)
> . This phrase is from Paul's sermon on Mars' hill to the men of Athens. Luke reports Paul as saying in The Acts of
> the Apostles: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said,
> For we are also his offspring." (17:28)
> . Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:4-25. (Charles Scribner's Sons, copyright 1941, 1943)
> . Either/Or 1, 220.
> 
> seeking today: "What our age lacks is not reflection but passion".73 In the Bahá'í Faith, however,
> truth-seeking is God-seeking. In his epistemology of God, Bahá'u'lláh makes spiritual passion de
> rigueur in the search for God/Truth. This element makes spiritual passion not an irrational, but
> an extra or super-rational element in the search for truth:
> 
> Only when the lamp of search, of earnest striving, of longing desire, of passionate
> devotion, of fervid love, of rapture, and ecstasy, is kindled within the seeker's heart, and
> the breeze of His loving-kindness is wafted upon his soul, will the darkness of error be
> dispelled, the mists of doubt and misgivings be dissipated, and the lights of knowledge
> and certitude envelop his being.74
> 
> One Bahá'í scholar at least has not been reluctant to mention the role of passion in Bahá'í
> epistemology. In a talk on "Bahá'í Scholarship-Definitions and Perspectives", Moojan Momen
> states: "I have never known an expert who was an impartial observer; the very fact that they are
> expert means that they have a passion about the subject. So it is illogical to consider them as
> impartial and dispassionate".75
> 
> Nietzsche in The Gay Science (Die Froliche Wissenschaft) in the provocative and intense
> language that typifies his style, speaks of an age to come in which what he calls "preparatory
> men" will "carry heroism into the pursuit of knowledge"...76 Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche's
> "preparatory men" had understood that knowledge had to be pursued with an almost violent
> intensity:
> 
> men characterised by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all
> great vanities...Soon the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer,
> hidden in the woods! At long last the pursuit of knowledge will reach out for its due: it
> will want to rule and own, and you with it!...For, believe me, the secret of the greatest
> fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your
> cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers
> and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners,
> you lovers of knowledge!77
> 
> . In Kaufmann, p. 18.
> . Iqán, 195-6
> . The Bahá'í Studies Review, 3:2, 1994, p. 55. Momen cites E.G. Browne "considered to be one of the greatest
> academics on Iran that there has ever been" (55) as one who dedicated himself passionately to Iranian studies as
> well as the Constitutional Movement.
> . Nietzsche, The Gay Science quoted in Kaufmann, p. 127.
> . Nietzsche, The Gay Science quoted in Kaufmann, p. 127. I take Nietzsche's bold and militant tropes to shock the
> "lovers of knowledge" out of complacency and to leave no stone unturned in the search for truth.
> 
> It is worth noting in this context, moreover, that doubt and despair have a legitimate role
> to play in the search for truth. Kierkegaard was to proclaim: "Every man who has not tasted the
> bitterness of despair has missed the significance of life."78 Further, Bahá'u'lláh's phrase the "true
> seeker"79 clearly implies that no one would ever become a seeker if one were not in the first
> place profoundly dissatisfied, disoriented or disillusioned with the spiritual status quo and/or the
> state of one's own soul. For why would one become a seeker in the first place, if one lived in a
> state of self-satisfaction? The stages of doubt and despair which Bahá'u'lláh clearly has in mind
> to dispel through a setting forth of "the essential prerequisites for the attainment by every true
> seeker of the object of his quest",80 can be positively overcome, he teaches, through the practice
> of ardent search, spiritual passion, ethical discipline, and a spirituality of detachment. Doubt and
> despair which are normally seen as the antithesis of faith can ultimately lead to a deeper, more
> authentic spirituality if they drive us to seek a resolution of their cognitive and emotional
> dissonance through the dynamics of transcendence.
> 
> The existential point of departure is, however, the life of the solitary individual living or
> being-in-the-world.81 Existentialists hold that being, or more concretely, life itself (existence)
> rather than the world of the idea (essence) should become the object of reflection. Sartre says, for
> example: "What they [existentialists] have in common is simply the fact that they believe
> existence comes before essence — or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective."82
> Sartre was, of course, a representative of atheistic humanism, and so designated himself.83
> Consequently for him this existence could not mean any other than human existence: "Man is
> nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism."84
> (my emphasis)
> 
> This vécu or Existenz of the believer, the lived experience, aims at transformation or
> insight, a shift in consciousness, or a deepening of the spirit of wisdom, dynamics that are
> ultimately the whole purpose of religion. This necessary connection between philosophy and life
> as Lebensphilosphie is what lies behind Ludwig Feuerbach's remark: "Do not wish to be a
> philosopher in contrast to being a man...do not think as a thinker...think as a living, real being.
> think in existence.85 Feuerbach seems to be saying that it is life itself which provides the materia
> 
> . Either/Or, II (Princeton, 1946), p. 175.
> . Iqán, p. 192.
> . God Passes By, p. 139. Shoghi Effendi refers to those passages of the Iqán which deal with the true seeker (pp.
> 192-196).
> . "Being-in-the-world" is one translation of Dasein in Heidegger's Being and Time and What is Metaphysics?
> . Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 348 (Kaufmann)
> . Sartre declares "Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative...". Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 349
> in Kaufmann.
> . Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 349. A Bahá'í perspective of existentialism would, of course, stand at odds with
> any system that reduces the cosmos to the existence of the individual alone.
> . Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Zurich, 1843) 78. Cited in Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, p. 89
> 
> bruta for philosophy, a commonplace which we are apt to forget. This is suggested by his phrase
> "think in existence." Philosophy cannot be, then, a flight from the quotidian. Thought moreover
> reflects upon the concrete situation in order to elaborate its view of truth, for in reality,
> philosophy found its origins in reflections upon life's common experiences.86 There is, moreover,
> an inexorability about the life situation which cannot be escaped, and must be willingly
> embraced for both spiritual transformation and reflection in depth. On this theme Martin Buber
> writes:
> 
> But he will not remove himself from the concrete situation as it actually is; he will,
> instead, enter into it, even if in the form of fighting against it. Whether field of work or
> field of battle, he accepts the place in which he is placed. He knows no floating of the
> spirit above concrete reality; to him even the sublimest spirituality is an illusion if it is
> not bound to the situation. Only the spirit which is bound to the situation is prized by
> him as bound to the Pneuma, the spirit of God.87
> 
> The life of the solitary individual in its relationship to the world is in Heidegger's word
> Dasein, our being-in-the-world, literally, our "being there"(Da=there. Sein=to be),88 which
> suggests an openness, an availability or sensitivity to the emerging, unfolding world around us,
> or in Gabriel Marcel's word a "disponibilité" (availability) which "connotes openness,
> abandonment of self, welcoming" of persons and events and which, for Marcel, is an expression
> of hope.89 Existential theism does not, moreover, ignore or deny the malaise of the spiritual
> subject who is in some sense dislocated or not whole because he/she lives in a world without
> spiritual values.90 Neither does prophetic teaching deny or ignore the unhappiness and injustices
> 
> (New York, 1964). Feuerbach's theology reduced God to anthropology, (God is man) to a mere projection of
> human self-consciousness. (The Essence of Christianity) Feuerbach was one of the Left Wing or "Young
> Hegelians" who used Hegel but stood him on his head. For Hegel, man was God in his self-alienation. For
> Feuerbach, God is man in his self-alienation.
> . The very early roots of Greek philosophy lie in Hesiod. After his poetic, mythological Theogony (eighth century
> B.C.E.), which deals with cosmology or the world order in light of the activities of the gods, Hesiod wrote Works
> and Days, also in poetry, in which man, rather than the gods, occupies the central stage. John Mansley Robinson
> writes that: "He is concerned with man as such, in his relations to the social order, to the gods, and to the
> necessities of life." (An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy, 3). Robinson writes that Aristotle had named
> Thales as the founder of Greek philosophy but states that it is unlikely that Aristotle had a first hand knowledge
> of Thales' views. Robinson views rather Anaximander, a younger contemporary of Thales, as the founder of
> Greek philosophy (23).
> . Eclipse of God, pp. 37-38.
> . Heidegger has himself explained the meaning of Dasein in the introductory key sentence of Being and Time with
> this typically obscure statement: "Das "Wesen" des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz" ("The essence of being
> there (Dasein) lies in its existence"). (p.42) Dasein referred to typically human existence and was the prelude to
> the greater discussion of Sein (Being).
> . James C. Livingstone, Modern Christian Thought From the Enlightenment to Vatican 11, p. 355.
> . G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) wrote wryly and amusingly about his own dislocation in the world: "The Christian
> optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man
> is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God...The modern philosopher told me again and again
> that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the
> 
> in the world, but rather seeks to understand their root cause, pour out a spirit of compassion on
> those who suffers or are victims of injustice or oppression, and expose or denounce such
> pernicious influences. It is precisely because of this dislocation while living-in-the-world that the
> believer seeks a greater integration of spiritual values within the life of the soul and attempts to
> construct a Lebensphilosophie out of those events, whether dreadful or numinous, that impact
> upon consciousness.
> 
> The ancient philosophers and prophets were well aware, of course, of our being
> dislocated in the world, and the existential view, although it did not come to be known by that
> name until the post world war two period, and contrary to those who think of it strictly as an
> outgrowth of modern self-alienation, angst and pessimism, is really an ancient perspective of the
> human condition. According to Tillich, who defined himself as a fifty percent existentialist and a
> fifty percent essentialist91, existentialism dates back to Plato's allegory of the cave in which the
> human being finds herself estranged from the knowledge of true self which Plato equated with
> the contemplation of the Form of the Good: "But Plato's existentialism appears in his myth of the
> human soul in prison, of coming down from the world of essences into the body which is its
> prison, and then being liberated from the cave".92
> 
> This alienation from an understanding of one's self as an expression of the "Self of God"
> has given rise to the angst so widely mentioned in connection with existentialism. One feels lost
> in a meaningless age when ones does not know who one is. One feels angst because one senses
> the threat to one's spiritual existence, but without the knowledge of the spiritual self, one cannot
> discover the cause of the dis-ease, and angst persists unabated. This is the both the tragedy and
> the pathos of spiritual ignorance. The believer experiences consequently a primordial longing to
> be at-one-ment with God and self, and return to the paradisaical garden or to be released from the
> cave and contemplate, in Plato's terms, the knowledge of the Good which if fully compatible in
> several ways with the knowledge of God.93 There is also in Tillich's statement, one of the basic
> meanings of soteriology, the feeling of being bound and then being set free.
> 
> In Bahá'í perspective, this overcoming of primordial alienation from God and self would
> involve recovering the supremely important notion of self as soul, already alluded to above, for
> this conviction in the existence of the divine reality of the soul imparts the message of what
> 
> wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring...I knew now why grass has always seemed to me as
> queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home." 389-390 Religious studies scholar
> and editor Jarsolav Pelikan comments in his introduction to Chesterton's extract from Orthodoxy that although
> Chesterton "was not a scholar or a theologian but a journalist and the author of the popular Father Brown
> detective stories" that nevertheless "in books on Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas, "and in two
> interconnected works entitled Heretics and Orthodoxy, he defended the integrity of the theological tradition with
> a vigor that many professional theologians and scholars could (and did) envy." (The World Treasury of Modern
> Religious Thought, 385)
> . Perspectives On 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology, p. 245.
> . Paul Tillich, Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology, p. 244.
> . The Republic, p. 227. Course on P. and A.
> 
> Gabriel Marcel called in his essay in Homo Viator "une métaphysique de l'espoir" (a metaphysic
> of hope):
> 
> I spoke of the soul. This word, so long discredited, should here be given its priority
> once more. We cannot help seeing that there is the closest of connections between the
> soul and hope. I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living
> organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers, it is no more than a
> function, it is merely fit to serve as an object of study to a psychology that can never
> register anything but its location or absence. It is precisely the soul that is the traveller;
> it is of the soul and of the soul alone that we can say with supreme truth that "being"
> necessarily means "being on the way" (en route).94
> 
> To counteract this fear, despair and meaninglessness, existential theism summons up the
> realm of spiritual values, chief among them being faith and hope, values that can be put forward
> to counteract that "emptiness" which Rollo May characterised as the "chief problem of people in
> the middle decade of the twentieth century",95 a statement that still holds as true, if not more so,
> in the last decade of this century as it did in the middle one.
> 
> Existential theism moreover values the personal. It puts the person above the proposition.
> "Personal" refers here to a perceptible, dynamic, interactive, and fully alive dimension that
> glimpses into the intimacies of the drama of the soul and the transpersonal space shared by the
> community of persons. Buber writes that "...every genuine religious experience has an open or a
> hidden personal character, for it is spoken out of a concrete situation in which the person takes
> part as a person".96 Believing existentialism looks at the universe as a dialogue with a "Thou", a
> "Thou" which Buber expounded as a new epistemology based on the notion of Begegnung
> (meeting/encounter).97 In all of the spiritual events that impact upon the soul one finds the
> encounter of a greater "Thou" with a lesser "thou", a greater Personal Being speaking to a lesser
> personal being, rather than an It speaking to an it. Buber writes: "In every sphere in its own way,
> through each process of becoming that is present to us, we look out toward the fringe of the
> eternal Thou; in each we are aware of the breath from the eternal Thou; in each Thou we address
> the eternal Thou."98
> 
> Further, it seems that as spiritual progress is made through the hierarchical spheres of
> creation, from the lowest to the highest, the universe has a tendency to become more and more
> 
> . Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator , pp. 10-11. For a further discussion of the metaphysic of hope, see Marcel's
> "Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope" in Homo Viator, pp. 29-67.
> . Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself, p. 14. Cf. Rollo May, Existential Psychology. R. May, E. Angel and H.F.
> Ellenberger, (Eds.) Existence.
> . Buber, Eclipse of God, p. 37.
> . See Begegnung in I and Thou.
> . I and Thou, p. 6.
> 
> alive, increasingly personal and knowing. Even Gaia and beyond her the whole physical universe
> itself, seems to be regulated by a semi-consciousness, a ghostly kind of personal knowing. Gaia
> seems to know what she is doing. Teilhard de Chardin has also pointed out that we move from
> the impersonal to the personal in our evolution toward the Omega Point in which matter strives
> to become spirit. This moving from the material to the spiritual in our evolution upward, is a
> thought that is virtually identical to one of the points in `Abdu'l-Bahá's cosmology.99 Spiritual
> evolution reveals then a personal, rather than an impersonal face.
> 
> This encounter or Begegunung with the divine, self, other or event takes on essentially
> two forms: the existential moment and the epiphanic moment. The existential moment is
> apocalyptic. It strongest psychological element is unpredictability or surprise. It is a sudden
> meeting, although its effects may persist over time. The existential moment is accompanied by
> various psychological states: suspense and/or surprise, confusion, anger, despair, anxiety, fear,
> awe, reverence, or in Kierkegaard's phrase "fear and trembling".100 In its ultimate form the
> existential moment brings "the sickness unto death".101 The existential moment radically alters
> our consciousness. It leaves us for better or worse. It is in reality a disguised form of a meeting
> with the alter ego, the spiritual self that is seeking to emerge, the potential true believer who is
> now being forced to peel away the mask of the old self so that the new self might emerge, a
> 
> . `Abdu'l-Bahá spoke on "the intrinsic oneness of all phenomena" (349) at Leland Stanford Junior University, Palo
> Alto, California on 8 October, 1912. This subject, he said, "is one of the abstruse subjects of divine
> philosophy"(349). The main theme developed by `Abdu'l-Bahá in this talk rested on both a teleological and
> cyclical view of the elementary forms of life in an "evolutionary process" when "a given cellular element or
> atom has its coursings or journeyings through various and myriad stages of life", until it finally reaches the
> human plane which stands at the apex of physical creation and thereafter reverts in cyclical fashion to the world
> of dust again (349). `Abdu'l-Bahá outlined the `Abdu'l-Bahá also spoke of the supreme necessity for this special
> creation of God (humankind) o live in peace: "Shall man, infinitely above them in degree [the lower kingdoms],
> be antagonistic and a destroyer of that perfection? God forbid such a condition!" (350) (The Promulgation of
> Universal Peace). Although the main point of `Abdu'l-Bahá's talk seems to be to give humankind its due as a
> special creation of God, and use humanity's unique gifts as a rallying-point for unity, `Abdu'l-Bahá makes it
> clear in other talks that the teleos of the spirit is linear its direction upward. See, for example, his talk on
> "Reincarnation" in which `Abdu'l-Bahá says: "The return of the soul after death is contrary to the natural
> movement, and opposed to the divine system" (Some Answered Questions 286). My understanding of this divine
> system is that spiritual evolution is teleological, not cyclical, and its ultimate end is the presence of God.
> . From the title of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard considered these
> books from the esthetic point of view to be "the most perfect" books that he had ever written. Translator's note,
> p. 18. One can certainly agree with Kierkegaard since the prose is these books is free of that strain and passion
> that is so characteristic of much of his other writing. There is both a simplicity and a philosophical lucidity in the
> prose of these works.
> . The Sickness Unto Death remains to this day the preeminent study in the psychology of despair and was very
> influential on the thinking of the existentialists who followed Kierkegaard such as Heidegger and Sartre.
> Kierkegaard explains that the sickness unto death is despair. Since death would mean the end of despair, he
> argues that "...the torment of despair is precisely this, not to be able to die. So it has much in common with the
> situation of the moribund when lies and struggles with death, and cannot die. So to be sick unto death is, not to
> be able to die — -yet not as though there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that even the last
> hope, death, is not available" (150-151). Sartre, of course, went one step forward and offered his own solution to
> despair — suicide. See Sartre's Le Suicide. Critics of Sartre said that this book was responsible for the suicides of
> more than one French intellectual.
> 
> continual process that can be both acutely painful and challenging to the self's spiritual resources.
> In this spiritual crisis, or "life test",102 one is brought face to face with one's own finitude, moral
> weakness or powerlessness to control and direct the event or more tragically to even recognize
> its full import. The event seems rather to direct us. In this moment of spiritual crisis, the
> experiences of the believer rise up in a confrontation with a sometimes unpredictable and hostile
> world perceived as other [It], but which the believer longs both to reconcile to and integrate
> within the self by a process of actualising inborn spiritual potential.
> 
> In the existential moment, the believer may also come face to face with the lower self,
> either in oneself or others, which Shoghi Effendi tells us can develop into "a monster of
> selfishness".103 If we have known the ideal self as found in the first valley of The Four Valleys
> (Châhâr Vadî) in the station of: "On this plane, the self is not rejected but beloved; it is well-
> pleasing and not to be shunned."104, now we come to know the "real"105 self as "O
> QUINTESSENCE OF PASSION", or "O REBELLIOUS ONES", or "O CHILDREN OF
> FANCY", or "O WEED THAT SPRINGETH OUT OF THE DUST".106
> 
> Lady Wisdom teaches that before the believer can come to know oneself truly, he/she
> must experience the workings of both the higher and lower self, the one as an epiphany of glory,
> the other in its sordid ugliness and sorry ignorance. This coming face to face with and
> overcoming the lower self is one of the imperative steps in the development of spiritual maturity.
> Herein also lies the justification for looking at the shadow side of human nature: the presence of
> the shadow means the sun is shining.
> 
> In the context of facing self in a crisis of faith, it is worth noting that in the Chinese
> language the word for "crisis" is made of two symbols: one means danger, the other opportunity.
> These two symbols are somewhat akin to the meaning of the existential moment. It is a moment
> in which the fate of our spiritual development hangs in the balance. Bahá'u'lláh speaks,
> moreover, of the fate of all of humanity hanging in the balance, as to whether it accepts or rejects
> his own revelation, so it is something that is true of the collective as well as of the individual.
> 
> Such an existential moment is, moreover, the datum of the human condition, the given
> which we do not control, the given which we did not choose for ourselves. But it is the given
> which presents us with a limitless opportunity for growth, an opportunity in which the believer is
> continually becoming when one willingly embraces an infinity of hope. Although the believer
> 
> . I have explored this notion of "life test" in a chapter entitled "A Paradigm of Spirituality and Life Tests" in my
> book Dimensions in Spirituality. Reflections on the Meaning of Spiritual Life and Transformation in Light of the
> Bahá'í Faith. (George Ronald 1994)
> . The phrase is taken from a letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to an individual, Dec. 10, 1947.
> . The Four Valleys, p. 50.
> . I use "real" here as the elemental, ego-centric, materially operating self, not as the ultimately real self.
> . The epithets are from The Hidden Words, Persian 50, Persian 65, Persian 67, Persian 68 respectively.
> 
> may perceive the existential moment as an alien other, as an It rather than a Thou, if one but
> listens carefully, one can hear the voice of the Thou speaking through. At such moments of
> crisis, the self is being offered the possibility of transcending its present state of consciousness to
> more fully comprehend the divine purposes and to more fully reflect the attributes of God. The
> contrary experiences of loss, paradox, suffering and eventual death which the believer
> unavoidably faces in the world, provide the opportunity for the believer to look for the silver
> lining in the sometimes dark cloud of existence, and either to choose or to reject the realm of
> spiritual values, to choose or to reject the teachings of the Word of God, to choose the path of the
> insistent, elemental self or the ways of God.
> 
> The reverse side of the existential moment is the epiphanic107 moment. Also of sudden
> onset, and by contrast with the weight of the existential moment, the epiphanic moment is a
> moment of exaltation, of great illumination or triumph when we are possessed by awe, or in the
> phrase of C.S. Lewis, "surprised by joy".108 It is Die Unglaubliche Lichtigkeit des Seins (The
> Unbelievable Lightness of Being).109 This epiphanic moment is a numinous disclosure of glory, a
> resounding victory, triumph or celebration, a hierophany that looms up large with promise and
> exaltation. It is Bahá'u'lláh in the garden of Ridván,110 and all the lesser reflections of that
> spiritual event. It is the believer winning the desires of the heart. It may be a divine healing, a
> mystical encounter, or the certitude that our lesser will has become one with the greater Will of
> God.
> 
> The moments of crisis alluded to above are moments of high realism. They take the
> believer out the realm of the ideal and into the realm of the real. They make theoretical concerns
> comparatively unreal by the imposition of their unavoidable stark realism. If, for example, we
> have just been told by a surgeon that we have inoperable cancer, our current projects and
> concerns suddenly pale into insignificance. If we have just been told that the life of a loved one
> hangs in the balance, our present preoccupations suddenly no longer have the same significance.
> The existential moment bears down upon us then with all the weight of its full signifying force.
> 
> A note of profound realism in relation to our own spiritual development was also struck
> 
> . From the Greek meaning "God manifest".
> . Surprised by Joy is the title of C.S. Lewis' spiritual autobiography in which he describes his conversion from
> atheism to Christianity. The title, however, does not describe Lewis' actual conversion experience which was as
> he has specified "not to Christianity" but to theism (p. 184) and which he has described as "strangely
> unemotional" (p.179), for it was a conversion to the realisation of free choice. Riding on top of a bus in Oxford,
> "going up Headington Hill", Lewis felt himself to be entrapped in a suit of armour or a kind of "corslet". Lewis
> became acutely conscious at that moment that he had been given the free choice either to keep this armour on or
> unbuckle it and go free. He was given the freedom to choose, but he did not seem to be able to do otherwise than
> to choose God. "Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level", says Lewis. "I felt as if I were a man of
> snow at long last beginning to melt...I rather disliked the feeling. (same) No doubt these were the hard and fast
> bonds of Lewis' former ego that were melting away.
> . This is the title of the 1984 existentialist novel by Milan Kundera.
> . See Robert Hayden's poem by the same title.
> 
> by Shoghi Effendi when he pointed out the difference between character and faith:
> 
> There is a difference between character and faith; it is often very hard to accept this fact
> and put up with it, but the fact remains that a person may believe in and love the Cause-
> even to being ready to die for it-and yet not have a good personal character, or possess
> traits at variance with the teachings. We should try to change, to let the power of God
> help recreate us and make us true Bahá'ís in deed as well as in belief. But sometimes the
> process is slow, sometimes it never happens because the individual does not try hard
> enough. But these things cause us suffering and are a test to us...111
> 
> Instead of making an "ideal preachment", instead of encouraging the believer to rise to
> new heights of spirituality, as one might have expected from the head of a world faith, with this
> statement Shoghi Effendi (1897-1957) strikes a note of profound and open realism. With a note
> of compassion, and without judgement, he merely observes that there are defects in the human
> character, weaknesses that are simply there. He acknowledges, moreover, that the believer does
> not always attain the hoped for end, a condition that produces suffering and trial. Shoghi
> Effendi's realism, however, seems to lead to the path of an easier acceptance.
> 
> Further Considerations of Existential Meaning in Bahá'í History and Sacred Writings
> 
> I have argued above that a view of existential theism is both valid and relevant for the
> widening field of Bahá'í studies since it offers insight into the meaning of the concrete spiritual
> experiences of the believer living-in-the-world. The patterns of existential experience lie,
> however, not only in the life of the ordinary believer, but more importantly they are found both
> in scripture and in sacred history, in the acts and events in the lives of the prophets of God. The
> quotidian, sacred history and the Word of God all have existential meaning.
> 
> I draw attention here to two existential moments: one in the life of the Bahá'í poet Robert
> Hayden; the other in the life of the "learned apologist"112 Mirza 'Abu'l-Fazl. In the case of
> Hayden it was a crisis of "fear and dread", and in `Abdu'l-Fazl's case his conversion to the Bahá'í
> Faith.
> 
> John Hatcher relates that Hayden one day came face to face with his own despair when he
> experienced the unsettling realisation that his religious beliefs were not reflected in his poetry. At
> least, this was his perception at that time. This realisation created a form of crisis in conscience
> for Hayden.
> 
> I sat in my front room one day when I was still teaching at Fisk University and was
> 
> . Shoghi Effendi, quoted in Bahá'í Marriage and Family Life, p. 20.
> . God Passes By, p. 195.
> 
> filled with a sense of cold, almost inexpressible horror, because suddenly something
> sort of swept over me: "You are not really dealing with reality. Everything you are
> doing is false because you don't really see the connection between what you say you
> believe and what you are doing as a writer." It was naturally a horrifying experience.113
> 
> Robert Hayden's experience bears some of the marks of the existential moment. It was
> sudden, personal and dramatic, and encountered Hayden in a moment which he perceived in
> some sense as a crisis of faith. It came in that same form of dread ("a horrifying experience"),
> doubt or denial (in this case self-denial) which is so characteristic of the soul's dark day. As he
> reflected upon what he perceived as a dilemma, Hayden gradually came to realise that his faith,
> as contrasted with his beliefs, was expressed in his poetry as a "spiritual orientation":
> 
> Indeed, when I was less sophisticated in my outlook, I thought that the only way I really
> could serve [the Bahá'í Faith] was by writing religious poems, but later on as I pondered
> what Bahá'u'lláh had said about the role of the artist, I began to realise that if you really
> had the new spiritual orientation, just about anything you did could be of service.114
> 
> There was, however, a beyond for Hayden's spiritual crisis, one that lead him out of the despair
> that his faith was not reflected in his art, to a reaffirmation or strengthening of faith. The
> resolution of Hayden's crisis of conscience points to that psychological adjustment which leads
> to a more complete acceptance of self, or in John Hatcher's phrase, to a "pattern of consolation".
> 
> Sacred history is not merely the documented and detailed re-creation of the objective
> record of events, but is also in a profound sense an intensely personal record, since sacred history
> is salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) and revolves around the life of the sacred figure who is the
> object of much devotion, as well as being the subject of considerable historical curiosity.
> 
> The acts and events in the lives of the prophets have profound relevance and symbolical
> significance for the spirituality of the ordinary believer, for their mission was carried out amidst
> continual persecution and hardship, both actual and threatened. The spirituality exemplified in
> the lives of the Manifestations of God was consequently not merely theoretical but profoundly
> authentic. For the present discussion, the forty year period of Bahá'u'lláh's imprisonment and
> exile is ripe with meaning for a life of spirituality in the face of major tests and difficulties. It
> would be a travesty, however, to look upon the two themes of Bahá'u'lláh's imprisonment and
> exile as a mere intellectual curiosity, either for theistic existentialism or any other intellectual
> current. Imprisonment and exile resulted in prolonged adversity and distressing hardship for
> Bahá'u'lláh and his family, sufferings to which he has amply testified in various passages of his
> writings. Bahá'u'lláh's imprisonment and exile, whether it was the imposed exile of the
> 
> . John Hatcher, "Racial Identity and Patterns of Consolation in the Poetry of Robert Hayden", The Journal of
> Bahá'í Studies, p. 38.
> . Same, pp. 38-39.
> 
> sovereign's decree, or his own voluntary exile into the mountains of Sulaymáníyyih in Kurdistan,
> affords an opportunity for us to consider how we also might face feelings of exile, alienation,
> loneliness and hardship in our own lives. Either by contrast or by analogy with Bahá'u'lláh's
> exile, we look to what both these twin themes might means to us in our lives and in our time. In
> the context of salvation history, however, one can immediately point to Bahá'u'lláh's declaration
> of the cosmic redemption of all humanity as part of the greater plan of God brought about by the
> untold sufferings and privation of Bahá'u'lláh. He declares that because of his woes all things
> were "immersed in an ocean of purity" [Ridvan tablet] [complete]
> 
> The two outstanding references in the Bahá'í writings to the existential condition come in
> the form of narrative theology in two pointed stories in The Seven Valleys (Haft Vádí) and The
> Four Valleys (Cháhár Vádí).115 Both theological narratives are concerned with the theme of the
> loss and recovery of true self in its encounter with God, alluded to earlier, as well as with the
> nature of true faith. The great literary critic Northrop Frye has written that this theme of the
> estrangement from self and its recovery is the grand theme of all of literature. It would not be,
> therefore, a unique concern of only existentialist writers, but of writers from all times and climes.
> Frye says: "The story of the loss and regaining of identity, is, I think, the framework of all
> literature..."116 Frye includes, of course, in his definition of literature, biblical literature whose
> themes and structures he has analyzed in great detail in a very creative and novel way.117
> 
> The first story is the one about the mystic and the grammarian in the first valley of The
> Four Valleys. Both travellers come to the "Sea of Grandeur", a metonymic and metaphorical
> phrase118 which is just another name for God. The station in this valley, Bahá'u'lláh tells us, is the
> station of the self as soul, that is the personal self rather than the philosophical self. This is
> indicated by the highly evocative transpersonal (intra-subjective) language Bahá'u'lláh uses in the
> text. As was mentioned above, the preoccupation with divine subjectivity, the self in its relation
> to God, is one of the main defining points of existential theism. This is also true of much of
> western mystical literature. Bahá'u'lláh says in his preeminent mystical treatise: "One must, then,
> read the book of his own self, rather than some treatise on rhetoric. Wherefore He (God) hath
> said: "Read thy Book: There needeth none but thyself to make out an account against thee this
> day."119 In addition to the reality of the human soul as the beloved of God, the quranic quotation
> cited by Bahá'u'lláh above raises the question of responsibility in attempting the challenging
> pursuit of self-knowledge. One must begin to read one's own self as one would read a book. One
> should begin to find meaning and understanding in the pages of one's own life. The theme of
> personal responsibility is moreover one of the cherished themes of existentialist writers and
> 
> . This mystical treatise of Bahá'u'lláh, largely unexplored by Bahá'í scholars, also demands some attention in
> order to develop an understanding of the mystical experience and mystical theology itself.
> . Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination, p. 21.
> . See Frye’s The Great Code.
> . Metonymy is the naming of a thing by one of its parts.
> . The Four Valleys, p. 51. The quaranic quote is from 17:15.
> 
> philosophers. Viktor Frankl has emphasized, for example, that the sense of taking responsibility
> for one's own mental and spiritual health rather than submitting passively to the outrages of
> fortune is one of the precipitators of healing.
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh's snippet-story of the mystic knower and the grammarian will tell, however,
> its own tale:
> 
> The story is told of a mystic knower, who went on a journey with a learned grammarian
> as his companion. They came to the shore of the Sea of Grandeur. The knower straightway flung
> himself into the waves, but the grammarian stood lost in his reasonings, which were as words
> that are written on water. The knower called out to him, "Why dost thou not follow?" The
> grammarian answered, "O Brother, I dare not advance. I must needs go back again." Then the
> knower cried, "Forget what thou didst read in the books of Sibavayh and Qawlavayh, of Ibn-i-
> Hájib and Ibn-i-Málik, and cross the water."120
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh then quotes from Rúmí's Mathnaví: "The death of self is needed here, not
> rhetoric/Be nothing, then, and walk upon the waves."121 Although this micro-tale in itself could
> become the object of some fairly lengthy commentary, there are three elements which link it to
> existential concerns. First, there is the wholehearted commitment to the life of faith exemplified
> by the mystic knower who is very reminiscent of Kierkegaard's "knight of faith", the one who
> makes that supreme act of the will, the "leap of faith" (Springet), and summoning up courage,
> walks across the water. He stands in marked contrast to the hesitant grammarian. One of the
> symbolic meanings of walking on the water is the death of self, or overcoming nature, for to
> walk upon water is not only to defy nature but to overcome it. Second, the story puts some
> definite limitations on the abilities of reason to understand God, also a favourite theme of
> Kierkegaard. Bahá'u'lláh's tale implies a strong critique of the powers of reason to put us in touch
> with divine reality. The grammarian's desire to return to his books was in reality a desire to
> return to logical forms of knowledge on which he relied, whereas the mystic knower's experience
> of God is clearly in the realm of le vécu, that direct experience that transcends and transports the
> seeker into some larger, more synthetic and all-encompassing experience of the divine, an
> experience that is based on more intuitive, non-discursive forms of knowing. For the existential
> perspective involves not primarily analysis, that is the breaking down of a thing into its
> constituent parts,122 but rather the holistic interpretation of a life experience in a spiritual context.
> When believing existentialism interprets a part of life, it does so in order to interpret it as a
> constituent of the whole. Indeed, there is a holistic vein to the experiences and writings of the
> 
> . The Four Valleys, p. 51.
> . ibid, p. 52.
> . One of the dangers in an épistemé that makes exclusive use of rational analysis is that, like Humpty Dumpty, the
> thinker is sometimes left with the impression that the left over pieces cannot be made to fit back together again.
> Either that, or one senses that one has violated something vital in the process of the breakdown and is left
> profoundly dissatisfied.
> 
> existential theists, for they aim at some unified vision of the self with the world.123
> 
> In the story of the mystic and the grammarian, it is the heroic self of the true believer that
> emerges as the mystic knower casts behind him the despair and doubt that is left in reason's
> wake, and leaps into the Sea of Reality. By taking this "leap of faith" into the waves of the Sea of
> Reality, the seeker finds the courage to defy "the violence of logic" and the dictates of reason
> that command the protection and preservation of self, but instead of sinking beneath the waves
> and drowning, the mystic knower defies gravity, rises above and walks on water. One notes in
> context again the quick turnabout, the sudden great reversal. Instead of falling as in the primeval
> experience of humanity's original parents, the mystic know rises. The spatial metaphor speaks
> abundantly of the powers of the "leap of faith", that of the concerted will to trust in the powers of
> God, self and the search. The spatial metaphor of walking upon the water is particularly effective
> in this context, for the leap of faith has the double effect of creating space, that is, it accentuates
> the freeing up of the spiritual traveller when released from the gravitational weight of self
> through the power of faith.
> 
> The Christian parallel to Bahá'u'lláh's text is Peter's attempt, in a sorry imitation of Christ,
> to walk upon the water when Jesus came to the disciples in "the fourth watch of the
> night...walking on the sea". (v. 25) (Matthew 14: 25-31) Like the mystic knower, who can
> moreover be interpreted as a veiled illusion to Bahá'u'lláh himself, Christ bids the disciple to
> walk upon the water, but Peter "when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning
> to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me." (v. 30) The rest of the story is familiar: Jesus stretches
> out his hand and catches Peter as he is about to sink into the waves and saves him. But Christ's
> pointed remark to Peter is significant, for it provides the moral meaning to the tale: "O thou of
> little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" (v. 31) The dispelling of doubt is also one of the object
> lessons of Bahá'u'lláh's seaside micro-tale. Although the grammarian was a learned man, and
> Peter an unschooled fisherman, both individuals were summoned to leave behind "the baser
> stages of doubt",124 and to throw themselves into that dimension of faith which is not
> characterised by philosophic reasoning, but essentially by faith defined as belief and implicit
> trust in the Divine Power that is greater than ourselves.
> 
> The realism in the gospel narrative is also noteworthy. Matthew does not hide the fact
> that Peter failed his test of faith, as he will fail later another test of faith when he is accused of
> being the Nazarene's companion during Christ's trial. (Matt. 26: 69-75) Because he feared the
> annihilation of his own being, Peter denied the One that he loved more than everything in the
> world, everything except his own life. Happily, Peter's test was resolved, as `Abdu'l-Bahá tells
> us, with untold remorse125, after which he became the petros, the "rock" that Christ had named
> 
> . Jaspers, p. 210.
> . The complete quotation is: "O FLEETING SHADOW! Pass beyond the baser stages of doubt and rise to the
> exalted heights of certainty. Open the eye of truth, that thou mayest behold the veilless Beauty and exclaim:
> Hallowed be the Lord, the most excellent of all creators! (The Hidden Words, Persian, no. 9)
> . "Even the glorious Peter was not rescued from the flame of trials, and wavered. Then he repented and mourned
> 
> him.
> 
> These existential moments should be viewed as an opportunity — and a necessity — for
> spiritual transformation. The tests of Peter, which appeared on the surface as massive failures,
> proved to be ultimately the means of attaining his predestined station of becoming the rock of
> faith. Also present in Peter's existential moment is the paradoxical note that failure participates
> profoundly in the means of ultimate success.
> 
> The other story, borrowed form Rúmí's Mathnáví by Bahá'u'lláh, is one of the brightest
> gems in all of spiritual literature. It is the story of the lost lover refound, the story of the bereaved
> Majnún who finds his beloved Laylí again in a garden. It is also pointedly significant that
> humanity's spiritual history, which begins in a garden in the Middle East, finds its fulfilment in a
> scripture written by Bahá'u'lláh, a modern day Prophet from the Middle East.126 This spiritual
> allegory of Bahá'u'lláh's is in one respect the complement and the fulfilment of the Genesis story
> of Adam and Eve which `Abdu'l-Bahá tells us is really a story about the bondage and liberation
> of the soul in its relationship to the material world and to God.127 But let us listen to Bahá'u'lláh
> himself:
> 
> There was once a lover who had sighed for long years in separation from his beloved, and
> wasted in the fire of remoteness. From the rule of love, his heart was empty of patience, and his
> body weary of his spirit; he reckoned life without her as a mockery, and time consumed him
> away. How many a day he found no rest in longing for her; how many a night the pain of her
> kept him from sleep; his body was worn to a sigh, his heart's wound had turned him to a cry of
> sorrow. He had given a thousand lives for one taste of the cup of her presence, but it availed him
> not. The doctors knew no cure for him, and companions avoided his company; yea, physicians
> have no medicine for one sick of love, unless the favor of the beloved one deliver him.
> 
> At last, the tree of his longing yielded the fruit of despair, and the fire of his hope fell to
> ashes. Then one night he could live no more, and he went out of his house and made for the
> market-place. On a sudden, a watchman followed after him. He broke into a run, with the
> watchman following; than other watchmen came together, and barred every passage to the weary
> one. And the wretched one cried from his heart, and ran here and there, and moaned to himself:
> "Surely this watchman is `Izrá'il, my angel of death, following so fast upon me; or he is a tyrant
> of men, seeking to harm me." His feet carried him on, the one bleeding with the arrow of love,
> and his heart lamented. Then he came to a garden wall, and with untold pain he scaled it, for it
> 
> the mourning of a bereaved one and his lamentation raised unto the Supreme Concourse." (`Abdu'l-Bahá, from a
> tablet to an American believer, December 23, 1902 in Star of the West, vol. 8, no. 19, March 2, 1918.
> . Strictly speaking, one cannot really say "ends" in a garden for there is no end to humanity's spiritual history on
> earth.
> . `Abdu'l-Bahá says that "It [Adam and Eve] contains divine mysteries and universal meanings and it is capable
> of marvellous explanations."(p. 123) and he gives only one them while inviting the reader to discover others. For
> `Abdu'l-Bahá's explanation, see "Adam and Eve" in Some Answered Questions, pp. 122-26.
> 
> proved very high; and forgetting his life, he threw himself down to the garden.
> 
> And there he beheld his beloved with a lamp in her hand, searching for a ring she had
> lost. When the heart-surrendered lover looked on his ravishing love, he drew a great breath and
> raised up his hands in prayer, crying: "O God! Give Thou glory to the watchman, and riches and
> long life. For the watchman was Gabriel, guiding this poor one; or he was Isráfíl, bringing life to
> this wretched one!"128
> 
> This little story is the ultimate allegory in the overcoming of despair when the seeker,
> sojourner or pilgrim is suddenly surprised by the joy of the soul's reunion with God, which can
> be viewed in another light as the soul's union with itself once it has discovered its true identity.
> Bahá'u'lláh's mystical story of the loss and regain of the beloved strikes the triumphant note of
> ultimate victory over the sense of loss of identity and despair. Bahá'u'lláh uses moreover the very
> word "despair" in his spiritual allegory once the bereaved Majnún reaches the nadir of anxiety.
> Bahá'u'lláh's narrative has moreover Majnún pushed beyond the limits of despair to the edge of
> madness, or to the contemplation of self-destruction, when the trauma of lost love is too much to
> bear for the sensitive soul. Further, one notices that Bahá'u'lláh's story does not hide us from the
> most pointed and distressing elements in human existence: acute pain, loneliness, alienation from
> self and the desires of the heart, and impending death.
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh's purpose in exposing these distressing themes is, however, clearly
> therapeutic. The experience of such distressing emotions, Bahá'u'lláh is telling us, can be the
> prelude to the healing and integration of self. The characters in existentialist literature, however,
> often remain trapped in the morass of these disturbing states of mind. This has contributed in no
> small measure to the endless despair and defeatism that certain forms of literary existentialism
> convey, and have resulted in the partially justified reputation that existentialism is a dark and
> pessimistic literature and philosophy. For, if as Sartre has said in L'être et le néant, (Being and
> Nothingness), our only real freedom lies in the possibility to "néantiser le néant" (to annihilate
> nothingness), then the prospects are bleak indeed. Bahá'u'lláh's allegory of the lost lover refound
> even contains Sartre's notion of Huit Clos, of no exit, of the lover's being hemmed in on all sides
> by the watchmen who are the symbols of all the conspiring forces of evil that have descended to
> hem in and to harm him. Unlike Sartre, however, Bahá'u'lláh does provide us with a way out, a
> door of hope, the promise of the lost lover who is found again. How this process takes place fully
> is the subject of a study in spiritual transformation, but Bahá'u'lláh's allegory of the lover (the
> soul) finding its true beloved (God) promises the tokens of God's love and mercy in the joyous
> surprise of the highest of paradoxes. The bereaved lover viewed himself to be lost, whereas he
> was, in fact, saved. His salvation is reunion with God.
> 
> The Existential Individual and Science
> 
> . The Seven Valleys, pp. 13-14.
> 
> It should be pointed out, however, that existential theism pursues no de jure anti-
> rationalistic, irrational, or chaotic approach to transcendence. It would recognize in a Bahá'í
> perspective, however, limits to both the arts and sciences as being the most meaningful
> expressions of the human mind and the final values in human culture. Bahá'u'lláh emphatically
> proclaims that neither science, nor the artifacts of civilization will save us, but only His Most
> Sublime Word.
> 
> Your sciences shall not profit you in this day, nor your arts, nor your treasures, nor your
> glory. Cast them all behind your backs and set your faces towards the Most Sublime
> Word through which the Scriptures and the Books and this lucid Tablet have been
> distinctly set forth.129
> 
> It is in this context of the limitations put on reason that Professor Bill Hatcher makes his
> strong critique of existentialism which he sets out in his essay "Science and the Bahá'í Faith" in
> Logic and Logos. Professor Hatcher is motivated by his perception that existentialism is an
> enemy of science (logic) and its methods. Professor Hatcher's assertions about some
> existentialists' views of science (Logic and Logos, pp. 106-111, 121-122) might best be
> described as a half truth. It is true that some existentialists held the view that the abstract,
> theoretical and practical aspects of science were insufficient to fully awaken the human spirit.
> But this insufficiency view of science, Professor Hatcher neglects to mention, is one that
> Bahá'u'lláh himself also puts forth. Bahá'u'lláh puts severe limitations on the abilities of both
> science and the arts, as the above quotation from Bahá'u'lláh's Lawh-i-Burhán (Tablet of the
> Proof) clearly indicates. Not only is Professor's view of existentialism "somewhat consciously
> exaggerated at some points"., as he himself admits, (p. 108) but it is reductionist in the extreme.
> 
> Professor Hatcher makes overly general statements about existentialism, all of them
> negative. He ascribes nothing positive to the theistic existentialists. Indeed, he does not mention
> one existentialist thinker by name in the essay, so it is difficult to determine exactly to whom he
> refers. Hatcher says, for example: "It [the existential religious experience] must strike like
> lightening for reasons which are never wholly clear or else as the result of some magic or occult
> practice. Clearly no experience of such an erratic and unstable nature can ever serve as the basis
> for a progressive society." (121-122) This is indeed a strange statement to make in the view of
> the fact that existential psychologists and psychiatrists are devoted to the healing of the mind. To
> associate existentialism with magic or the occult, however, is highly exaggerated. Hatcher's
> dismissal of existentialist religious experience is based on two charges: (i) "the existentialist
> grants that science cannot be applied to religion". (ii) "He values this subjective aspect of
> religion above science and its method." (p. 108) If the existentialist values religion above
> science, then I rather suspect most Bahá'ís are existentialist as well. Further, Professor Hatcher
> fails to mention that Karl Jaspers, one of the founders of post world war two existentialism,
> clearly valued both science and reason, views he set forth in Reason and Anti-Reason in our
> Time, although Jaspers did recognize some of its limitations. And why indeed should he not?
> 
> . Tablets, p. 211.
> 
> Only those who view science as some kind of absolute might argue that science deserves to be
> put above any reproach. Einstein, however, like `Abdu'l-Bahá, deplored "the malignant fruits of
> science." [`Abdu'l-Bahá, source] Even those existentialist philosophers who critiqued science,
> like Heidegger, were not de jure enemies of science. What they deplored was that the partial and
> limited abilities of science to decipher total reality were becoming the object of absolutistic
> claims for its abilities. Moreover, it is not excluded that one use both analytical (logical) and
> existential (subjective) approaches to religious knowledge. The very way that Professor Hatcher
> describes existentialist religious experience as "private", "emotional" "uncommunicable" [sic]
> "even chaotic" and "unsystematic" as driving a wedge between science and religion (p. 107) is an
> implied critique of the experience, and is not tenable. The fact that religious experience is
> private, emotional and at times uncommunicable is a valid, enriching and meaningful aspect of
> religious experience. We are not duty-bound to apply scientific method to our religious
> experiences in order to test their validity, as Professor Hatcher suggests, for such an approach
> reduces the experience of the divine to the controlled experiment, that is, to something to be
> manipulated. Third, there is the notion of divine subjectivity to which I have referred several
> times and which has lead, incidentally, to the criticism that existential writers — -and this
> criticism has also been levelled at the mystics — -are overly preoccupied with self.130 This
> criticism is being raised only to dismiss it, for clearly we had better be preoccupied with an
> understanding of true self if we are to make real spiritual progress. The inscription once written
> above Apollo's shrine at Delphi (“know thyself”) stands as both an eternal reminder and a
> challenge for all souls to make that longest of voyages, the journey into the unknown reaches of
> the inner self.
> 
> Here I share Kierkegaard's view that the objectivity of the physical sciences takes us in a
> direction that moves away from personal truth. But the nature of the scientific enterprise is to
> objectify and with objectification we move away from the subjectivity that seeks enlightenment
> in ethics and religion, in the search for faith, meaning and values. Personal truth, on the other
> hand, is what moves toward the human being. It is what gives the human being profound and
> personal meaning; that is, a dynamic that is capable of altering lives, profoundly changing
> consciousness, moulding behaviour, or bestowing a depth of meaning, or hallowing existence.
> 
> . A.J. Paton, for example, wrote in The Modern Predicament that Kierkegaard was "self-centered" and that "he
> hardly ever thinks of anyone but himself." (p. 120) Although Paton's critique warns of the danger of egotism, it is
> not substantial because Kierkegaard and others who speak in this mode are not just speaking of subjectivity but
> of intersubjectivity, whether that be with God or with others. (Macquarrie, p. 280)
>
> — *The Spiritual Self in Baha'i Studies (Used by permission of the curator)*